LONDON: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who turns 96 soon, has spoken of serious fatigue after she contracted COVID-19 in February despite aides downplaying her illness.
At the time, Buckingham Palace said the vaccinated monarch had “mild, cold-like symptoms.”
But she was forced to cancel a series of appointments with foreign diplomats, at the start of her record-breaking 70th year on the throne.
Queen Elizabeth recalled her experience on Wednesday when she spoke to staff and patients by video-link to mark the opening of a hospital unit named in her honor in east London.
Speaking to one former COVID-19 patient who required ventilation, the queen said about the virus: “It does leave one very tired and exhausted, doesn’t it?
“This horrible pandemic. It’s not a nice result,” she said, according to footage released by the palace on Sunday.
The unit at the Royal London Hospital was built in record time to cope with an influx of COVID-19 sufferers.
The construction team hailed the “Dunkirk spirit” that inspired them, referring to the World War II retreat of British and allied forces from northern France, in the face of a Nazi onslaught.
“Thank goodness it still exists,” the queen replied.
“It is very interesting, isn’t it, when there is some very vital thing, how everybody works together and pulls together — marvellous, isn’t it?”
Fears for the queen’s health have lingered since she had an unscheduled overnight stay in hospital last October, which was only revealed by the palace later.
Her public appearances have become rarer since, and she has complained of mobility problems, as her 96th birthday approaches on April 21.
She is to miss a religious service on Maundy Thursday this week and will be represented by her eldest son and heir, Prince Charles.
The service marks the start of Easter weekend, and is normally a fixture in her calendar.
Queen Elizabeth felt ‘exhausted’ from COVID-19
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Queen Elizabeth felt ‘exhausted’ from COVID-19
- Queen Elizabeth recalled her experience on Wednesday when she spoke to staff and patients by video-link to mark the opening of a hospital unit named in her honor in east London
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
